Well Of Course Water Sommeliers Are a Real Thing Now

You know what? I love some fucking water. I bet I love it more than you or anyone you know. I live and work in the desert, and at any given point I'm probably at least half-thinking about water. Do my plants need it? Is my pee too yellow? Should I go soak in some of it? What should I write about water? On a 110°F day, I can crush 32 oz of water an hour easily,  and I'll still go until dark without having to actually pee. Water is everything, one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms together giving Earth life, or at least the only kind of life we really know. It should be celebrated in every way possible.

Bottling water and selling it out of coolers isn't celebrating it, however. You can read my recent rant-essay about that here, but the general idea is that bottled water steals the fundamentalness of H20 and makes it into another stupid product with a random mountain on the label, indicating "nature" and "purity." Though part of the joy of any water is that it's always cycling within nature, even the water from your city tap, and it's always being created and destroyed. I love some fucking tap water. Along with libraries and parks, water from a tap in your house is one of the best things civilization has going.

You should hardly be surprised to hear that I hate fancy water and fancy water culture, the latter of which is booming, according to a recent piece in the Los Angeles Times. The article is mostly about Martin Riese, the gentleman in charge of the "water menu" at a restaurant in Los Angeles. That menu will eventually feature about 20 different waters, from 10 different countries. One will be his signature water, called "Beverly Hills 90H20." It's from the Sierra Nevada mountains and comes with "added minerals."

"All waters have unique tastes, and a lot of Americans think water is just water, but I completely don't believe in that," Riese tells the Times. "Water has so many interesting nuances." Water often does taste differently depending on what it's touched most recently in its lifetime, which could have started a few weeks ago in the contrail of a jet or hundreds of millions of years ago. Things will be in solution with the water based on its environment, maybe a small amount of chlorine in a municipal supply or some iron from a desert aquifer or a bit of cow shit soaked into a mountain creek.

Water is known as the "universal solvent." This is for the simple reason that more things dissolve into it than anything else we know of. Which is a pretty fascinating characteristic; water is always collecting its environment. So there is value in experiencing water from different places, as you're getting a bit of those places on your tongue with it. It's a pretty theoretical value, however: water is always treated in some fashion, which is neccessarily a removal process. A purification process. That sort of defeats the point. Once pure, water is back to being water.

I'm bothered, obviously, by trends that make different waters more "special" than others ($20 a bottle special, in the case of our sommelier) because it not only does a disservice to water as an amazing thing by definition, but it creates a fake market. Pure water is precisely the same as any other pure water, and this is a fact that keeps us alive on Earth and, as the water crisis ramps up in the coming decades, will be even more crucial in that survival. Note that one specific hurdle to overcoming said crisis is actually mental, coming from misconceptions about "old" water and "used" water, and has to do with a presistent general reluctance to the notion of recycled water.

The reality that I think Riese misses is that water doesn't become its solute (the thing dissolved into it); the blackest water cascading through your city's sewer system is still water (and is referred to properly as "blackwater") and can be refined to something more pure than his bottle of Fuji with not-too-special technology. And this fact is at least one crucial part of mankind's future survival. Bottoms up.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.